In the course of designing a city garden in Helsinki, I learned that city planners worried I would fail to distinguish the urban from the rural via the forms and types of planting. Finland has too much countryside for their liking, it appears.
Advanced societies in the twentieth century saw the apparent conquest of diseases associated with dirt and soil through improved sanitation and germ-fighting technologies. Fresh air movements against disease were important elements of urban reform, opening the way for renewed efforts to enlarge the playground already provided to the middle class and extended to the working class in the early part of the century.
Paris already had such a repurposed industrial rail line, the Promenade Plantée, whose transformation into a park began in the late 1980s.
Poultry keeping was banned in New York City in an effort to extirpate the remnants of the farms and farm-like practices that survived in far-flung corners of the city, such as Gravesend, Brooklyn, or Staten Island. New York City, like virtually every municipality, has detailed laws on the keeping of animals, whether classed as pets, companions, or livestock, including those held for slaughter. Pets were a matter of contention, banned from middle- and working-class apartment buildings, until the 1960s. Animals classified as wild are banned—the category “wild animals” defines the uncivilized zošsphere; ergo, people who keep them are not “virtuous” but decadent or “sick.” New Yorkers may recall the incident a decade ago in which Mayor Giuliani, a suburbanite longing to join the ranks of the cosmopolitan, hurled personal insults (prominently and repeatedly, mentioning “an excessive concern with little weasels”) at a caller to his weekly radio program who wanted ferrets to be legalized as household pets. The call, from David Guthartz of the New York Ferrets’ Rights Advocacy, prompted a famous three-minute tirade in which Giuliani opined, “There’s something deranged about you. The excessive concern that you have for ferrets is something you should examine with a therapist, not with me.” See →.
See →.
Here one is tempted to offer a footnote to Lefebvre’s mid-century observations on the urban frame (see Martha Rosler, “Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism, Part I: Art and Urbanism, e-flux journal, Issue 21, →), to take account of the blowback onto the urban paradigm of the neoliberal attributes of exurbia that we have classed under the rubric of suburbanization. As neoliberalism takes hold, even long-standing democratic processes of public decision-making, such as town meetings that obtained in small towns, succumb. As to the question of aristocracy, the figure of the aristocrat—especially the one in ratty old furs and drafty mansions—has haunted discussions of the art world, for artists are still disproportionally influential for the culture at large, while some reap handsome financial gain from this excursion and others simply stand around.
J. Eric Oliver, Democracy in Suburbia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Rather than town meetings, one more typically finds the retreat to the backyard and the country club.
The work was installed in 1981, having been commissioned by the Art-in-Architecture Percent for Art Program, under the auspices of the federal General Services Administration, which also oversaw its removal. The event is interesting because it called upon a probably manufactured split between “the ordinary public” (the victims of the art) and the pitiless elite sectors of the art world—manufactured because the campaign for the removal of the work was in fact spurred by an aggrieved judge, Edward Re, of the arcane United States Customs Court. The following literature on Tilted Arc may be useful: Janet Zweig, Notes and Comments column, New Yorker (Mar. 27, 1989); Harriet F. Senie, Tilted Arc Controversy: Dangerous Precedent? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Gregg M. Horowitz, “Public Art/Public Space: The Spectacle of the Tilted Arc Controversy,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54, 1 (Winter 1996) (“an early version of the strategy of censorship-as-liberation used by regressive political forces in other antidemocratic projects,” 8); and, by Serra’s wife, The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents, eds. Martha Buskirk and Clara Weyergraf-Serra,(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990). For an immediate, partisan view, see the film The Trial of Tilted Arc (1986), centering on the hearings relating to the removal of the sculpture.
“The Gates is the largest artwork since the Sphinx,” begins a promo site’s appreciative article, see →. Mayor Bloomberg, a man known to tout the arts for their economic potential, inaugurated the work by dropping the first curtain. The artists call the fabric color “saffron,” a colorful and exotic food spice but not the orange of the work. A lovely article on children’s responses to the work—upper-middle class, upper class, and working class—includes the following: “Subsequent visits have somewhat altered her view. ‘I don't like the look of them but I like the way everybody is at the park and happy,’ she said, making her the ideal experiencer of the work.” Julie Salomon, “Young Critics See ‘The Gates’ and Offer Their Reviews: Mixed,” New York Times, February 17, 2005. See →.
See Sharon Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)., discussed in part II of this essay.
A further consideration of this project and its municipally sanctioned follow-up, Olafur Eliasson’s Waterfalls (2008), would have to point to the insistence of these projects on the power of the artist, and his grant-getting, fund-raising, and bureaucracy-besting prowess, with urbanized nature as the ground. In other words, the intellectual labor of the artist is disclosed to cognoscenti but the spectacle suffices for the masses. This problem was partly addressed by Eliasson in a radio interview describing the scaffolding of the Waterfalls as an homage to (manual) labor, a theme not otherwise much noted in his work.
Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel ed. Kurt Wolff (Glencoe, Il: Free Press of Glencoe, 1950). Originally published as Die Großstadt und das Geistesleben (Dresden: Petermann, 1903).
Here consider the relationship between street fashion, working class attire, and middle-class envy of these. In addition, before youth-culture demands in the 1960s loosened most dress codes (prompting outraged businesses to post notices announcing “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service”), it was illegal to wear “short shorts” and other forms of skimpy dress on New York City streets.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 3–4.
Quoted in Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 196. (See Part II of the present article.) Jeremy Rifkin subsequently published a book with the same title as his article. See Jeremy Rifkin, Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism Where All of Life Is a Paid-for Experience (New York: Tarcher, 2000).
Rifkin, Age of Access, 54.
Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007) and The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999). Aurora is a tiny town of about 13,000 residents, in Northeastern Ohio, near Akron. Do visit Pine and Gilmore’s fun-loving website, →. Rifkin cites their first book: “Management consultants B. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore advise their corporate clients that ‘in the emerging Experience Economy, companies must realize they make memories, not goods,’” Age of Access, 145.
Two reviews, by two women reviewers, from one day’s New York Times Arts section make this point. They sharply contrast the old, “culture is serious business,” mode and the new, “culture ought to be fun” mode. A senior, front-page reviewer in “Cuddling with Little Girls, Dogs and Music,” writes skeptically about crowd-pleaser Yoshitomo Nara’s show, at the formerly staid Asia Society, that it “adds new wrinkles to the continuing attempts by today’s museums to attract wider, younger audiences, and the growing emphasis on viewer participation.” A few pages on, in “A Raucous Reflection on Identity: Jewish and Feminine,” a junior reviewer writes, “Don’t be put off by the yawn-inducing title of the Jewish Museum’s 'Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism.' The show is a puckish, punchy look at the women’s art movement (that draws) inspiration from Marcia Tucker’s ‘Bad Girls’ survey of 1994.” There is nothing particularly raucous in the works she describes. See → and →. The art journalist Jerry Saltz, based at a local publication, earlier demonstrated his lack of recognition of the atmosphere of exclusivity, high seriousness, and sobriety typically projected by high-art institutions (definitively analyzed by Pierre Bourdieu) by wondering in print why people do not visit galleries even though they do not charge admission. The need to abrogate this forbidding atmosphere is not what is at issue here, but the emphasis upon “the museum experience,” or experiences, represents a new management imperative.
See →.
See →.
Vanessa Fuhrmans, “Berlin Broods over a Glitz Invasion,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2010. See →.
Rachel B. Doyle, “Krakow: Add Art, Stir in Cachet,” New York Times, August, 29, 2010. See →.
See part II of this essay.
Or not very gracefully. In February of this year, the state of Michigan ordered the Detroit school superintendent to close half of Detroit’s schools, swelling class size to sixty in some cases. See Jennifer Chambers, “Michigan Orders DPS to Make Huge Cuts,” Detroit News, February 21, 2011. See →. The library system may also be forced to close almost all its branches; see Christine MacDonald and RoNeisha Mullen, “Detroit Library Could Close Most of Its Branches,” Detroit News, April 15, 2011. See →.
The auto industry began siting some of its factories in the suburbs and small towns surrounding Detroit, and auto workers followed them there; however, black auto workers complained they were kept in Detroit at the dirtiest, least desirable jobs, while the union bosses were complicit with the industry.
See Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution (London and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975; Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1998).
Berry Gordy’s Motown Records itself departed long ago; the Belleville Three had moved on by the 1990s, although the Detroit Electronic Music Festival continues.
See →.
Fascination with ruins is a long standing and deeply romantic facet of mourning and melancholy; current manifestations include well-established tourist pilgrimages to sites like New York’s former World Trade Center but also an interest, no longer disavowed, in images of accidents, death, and destruction, and sometimes up-close, well-supervised, and preferably well-funded short-term visits to the safer edges of war zones of various sorts.
Melena Ryzik, “Detroit’s Renewal, Slow-Cooked,” New York Times, October 19, 2010. The article opens, “How much good can a restaurant do?” and later comments, “To make sure the positive change takes hold, Mr. Cooley has parlayed the good will of his barbecue joint into a restless pursuit of community-building.” See →.
Ibid.
Boggs’s most recent book, written with Scott Kurashige, is The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Among her other books are Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (1976) and Living for Change: An Autobiography (1998). In 1992, she co-founded the Detroit Summer youth program; having moved with her husband James to Detroit, where she expected the working class to “rise up and reconstruct the city,” she adapted instead to a city in a very different phase. “I think it’s very difficult for someone who doesn’t live in Detroit to say you can look at a vacant lot and, instead of seeing devastation, see hope, see the opportunity to grow your own food, see an opportunity to give young people a sense of process ... that the vacant lot represents the possibilities for a cultural revolution.... I think filmmakers and writers are coming to the city and trying to spread the word.” Democracy Now! radio program (April 14, 2011), archived at →.
Moore is from Flint, Michigan, the site of the historic sit-down strike of 1936–37 that led to the empowerment of the United Auto Workers as the sole bargaining representative of General Motors workers; the Roger of the title was Roger Smith, the head of GM at the time and the executive responsible for huge worker layoffs that led to the near-total devastation of Flint. Credits for the film Finally Got the News are “A Film by Stewart Bird, Rene Lichtman, and Peter Gessner, Produced in Association with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.”
See Camilo José Vergara, The New American Ghetto (Newark: Rutgers University Press, 1995).
Parts of this project were included in the exhibition “Home Front,” the first exhibition of the cycle “If You Lived Here” that I organized at the Dia Art Foundation in New York in 1989.
This project, two years in the making (2008-2010), will continue through the auspices of Wayne State University with some further collaboration with Berenyi and with Eastern Michigan University. See →.
See →.
See Donna Terek (columnist), “Detroit Ice House Is Really All About Art,” Detroit News (Feb. 7, 2010); and →, which includes a video of the project. Funding was sought via Kickstarter. The creators describe the project as “An Architectural Installation and Social Change Project” on their blog, → (now seemingly inactive), detailing their Detroit activities, a forthcoming film and photo book, and the many media sites that have featured their project.
According to its website, →, “the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency ... is aimed at new types of urban practices (architecturally, artistically, institutionally, everyday life, and so forth) that came into existence, creating a new value system in Detroit. The project is an initiative by architects Andrew Herscher and Mireille Roddier, curator Femke Lutgerink, and Partizan Publik’s Christian Ernsten and Joost Janmaat. In collaboration with the Dutch Art Institute and the University of Michigan, generously funded by the Mondriaan Foundation and Fonds BKVB.” I note that, by chance, Andrew Herscher is the architect who provided a very workable partnership on plans for the building my students and collaborators and I developed at Utopia Station at the Venice Biennale of 2003. Another Dutch residency in pilot phase is the Utrecht-based Expodium International Artists Residency Program: European Partnership, with Detroit. “The goal ... is to enter into a long-term collaboration with Detroit by creating an expanding network ... to exchange knowledge about urban models, shrinkage and social, political and artistic developments in urban transition areas. Detroit based cultural initiatives respond creatively to the city’s current situation and set to play a vital role in the redevelopment of Detroit. It is this condition that has our special interest. Information gained through this platform provides vital input for the Expodium program here in the Netherlands.” See →. Recently, fifteen students from the Netherlands participated in the Detroit City Poetry Project presentation at the Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCAD); see →. Why does the Netherlands send its art, architecture, and students to study cities, towns, and neighborhoods—including Dutch ones—considered to pose intractable problems? One may surmise that the Dutch, who seem fully engaged with the creative-class-rescue hypothesis, are hoping that artists and architects will assist in urban research and melioration and further help them found a new consultative industry: a Dutch urban advisory corps (this last solution—urban consultation—was proposed to me as an answer to my question “Why?” by Salomon Frausto, Head of Architectural Broadcasting at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam).
See →.
The Wiz is a version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), journalist L. Frank Baum’s important putatively allegorical children’s book about rural farm-dwellers translocating to up-to-date metropolises and of a still-fascinating mid-century musical film The Wizard of Oz (1939), based on the Oz tales; this later version of 1978 has a largely African American cast and features Detroit-born Michael Jackson.
See →.
Ibid.
See →. While vacillating between claiming it as an “architectural installation” and as a social change endeavor, the project’s authors suggest that the house will be, virtuously, disassembled and the land donated perhaps to a community garden.
Guyton has had some degree of success as a local, indigenous, non-elite artist of choice and was included in the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale as well as garnering other attention. For Sala’s project, see →. Rama’s project, as part of his mayoral endeavors, has had a different trajectory. According to the UK’s Architecture foundation, Rama’s actions constituted “an aesthetic and political act, which prompted social transformation, and much debate, through its visualization of signs of change.” During the 2003 edition of the Tirana Biennial, Sala and Hans Ulrich Obrist invited Olafur Eliasson, Liam Gillick, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, among other artists, to “turn residential blocks into unique works of art”; see →. The project continued, and in the 2009 iteration included façade contributions from Tala Madani, Adrian Paci, Tomma Abts, and others. However, the Tirana Biennial 2009 website notes that the exhibition would critically address the city’s moment of development “through ‘wild’ urbanization, fast capital investments and within the horizon of a neoliberal context, (expanding) into the domain of architecture and processes of urbanization.” See →.
Although the mayor derided the group as vandals, a number of the buildings were subsequently torn down. See Celeste Headlee, “Detroit Artists Paint Town Orange to Force Change,” National Public Radio radio broadcast, December 7, 2006. Good magazine uploaded a video of the project to YouTube: →. One of the group comments: “This didn’t start out as this social crusade; it started as an artistic endeavor.” (That’s what they all say, if they have any art-world sense; see Part II of the present article.)
For Fletcher’s testimony, see Between Artists: Harrell Fletcher and Michael Rakowitz (New York: A.R.T. Press, 2008).
The term “interventionism” streaked like a comet across the art world firmament but seems to have been largely extinguished.
Zukin, Naked City.
I attempted to draw attention to both this trend’s promises and its perils with the work entitled Proposed Helsinki Garden in Singapore at the latter city’s biennale earlier this year. The project attempted simultaneously to articulate a commitment to public practice and a serious, not to say critical, examination of it. Too often, in discussing art, one finds the equation of criticism with refusal, allowing the absence of one to indict the reality of the other.
Facebook itself takes the form in which shouting into the wind small self-promotional messages to an appreciative imaginary public is encouraged, and in which the occasional openings for the genuine exchange of ideas seem to snap shut in an instant. At the other pole from the particular language of promotion are the grant-writing discourses, Orwellian in their Byzantine inapplicability to most artists or projects you might know, but whose categorical imperatives have only escalated over the years. In the UK, the categories for art institutions and academic departments are mind-boggling, but everywhere this instrumentalized language framing instrumentalized projects is infecting the terms in which art exhibitions are laid out.
See →.
Paolo Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus,” trans. Ed Emory, in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 188–209.
Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1979), 75.
Colin Mercer, “Cultural Planning for Urban Development and Creative Cities” (2006), 2–3. See →.
Here, Mercer is quoting a 2004 report put out by Partners for Livable Communities, which advises many Business Improvement Districts, or BIDs, with cultural elements. (A BID is a public-private partnership, a step along the path to privatization of urban public amenities and spaces. In New York they saw their genesis during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s.) Mercer also points out that “knowledge based workers” make up half the work force of the European Union.
Ibid., 2. Mercer’s enthusiasm presumably factored into his own decision to leave academia for consulting work.
Max Nathan, “The Wrong Stuff? Creative Class Theory and Economic Performance in UK Cities.” See →.
Andy Merrifield, Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City (New York: Routledge, 2002), 125.
Manuel Castells, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach (Boston: The MIT Press, 1979), 317.
See →.
Ann Markusen, “Urban Development and the Politics of a Creative Class: Evidence from the Study of Artists,” Environment and Planning A 38, no. 10 (2006): 1921–1940; Richard Lloyd. Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City (New York: Routledge, 2006). See part II of the present article for a further discussion of these authors’ works.
Brian Holmes, “Liar’s Poker,” in Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering (New York: Autonomedia, 2008). First published as “Liar’s Poker: Representation of Politics/Politics of Representation” in Springerin (January 2003). See →.